News Release

'A Lethal Inheritance'

Uncovering the science behind generations of mental illness

Book Announcement

Prometheus Books

'A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness'

image: "A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness" (ISBN 978-1-61614-466-1) is published by Prometheus Books. view more 

Credit: Prometheus Books

Sometimes the most interesting way to digest scientific information is within the context of personal experiences. Likewise, the story of someone's personal journey or struggle can take on broader significance when melded with the insights of scientific knowledge. "A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness," is "a graceful balance between science and memoir," according to author Linda Gray Sexton, and that combination allows a compelling look at the issue of mental illness in families.

In this new book, Emmy Award-winning science writer, blogger, and author Victoria Costello recounts how the mental unraveling of her seventeen-year-old son Alex compelled her to look back into family history for clues to his condition. She eventually tied Alex's descent into paranoid schizophrenia to his great grandfather's suicide in 1913, but this insight brought no quick relief. Within two years of Alex's diagnosis, both she and her youngest son succumbed to two different mental disorders: major depression and anxiety disorder.

While pursuing care for herself and her sons, Costello discovered startling new neuroscientific and genetic findings that explain how clusters of mental illness traverse family generations. As Booklist says "Costello's educative memoir gives poignant testimony to the fact that not only do we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us; we carry their burdens as well."

Weaving the scientific into the personal, Costello reports on the startling findings neuroscience is yielding about the complex interplay between genes and environment that drives mental illness, and what it now tells us about how parents can trump a lethal inheritance. She shares the results of long-term U.K. and European family studies identifying the earliest signs of mental illnesses that can be passed on from grandparents to parents and grandchildren. She tracks ongoing clinical trials to reverse the courses of these diseases through early intervention with the latest evidence-based treatments and offers brain-healthy choices individuals and families can make to prevent mental illness—freeing future generations to live healthier, happier lives.

"It's a deeply personal book," says Monsters and Critics. "Filled with solid science, useful guidelines and information on the latest cutting edge studies, ["A Lethal Inheritance"] delivers plenty of material for anyone coping with mental illness or seeking to understand someone who is."

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Victoria Costello (San Francisco, CA) is an Emmy Award-winning science writer with articles in Scientific American MIND and Brain World. She is the coauthor with child psychiatrist Jack Westman, MD, of A Complete Idiot's Guide to Child & Adolescent Psychology, and with family therapist Stephen Martin of The Parent's Everything Guide to Childhood OCD. Her blog posts on psychology and family mental health can be read on the Huffington Post, Yahoo! News Health & Wellness, PsychCentral, Mamapedia, and MentalHealthMomBlog. With the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, Costello is a speaker, workshop facilitator and state and federal advocate working to improve the mental health of youth and families.


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